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Dream of unlimited, clean nuclear fusion energy within reach
- ncmncm 4y agoDreams are always within reach, night after night. Reality is harder. There will never be commercially competitive Tokamak fusion power: it would cost much more to extract than fission, and fission is already today far from competitive, and gets even less so with each passing day. It is just possible that aneutronic fusion could someday be practical, but synthesizing enough of the needed 3He would be difficult. In the indefinite future, p-11B might someday become practical. We may need one or the other of those for substantial outer solar system operations. If they turn out impractical, such operations will be obliged to depend instead on power beamed from the inner solar system, or from big solar concentrators nearer by. The practical limit on the size of the latter would be very large, but erecting them would be a big job, and they would tend to be as far away from desired operations as the inner solar system. Until such facilities to beam power get built, each outer solar system craft would need to carry its own big solar concentrator.